With the advent of portable media players, such as the Apple® iPod® portable media players, digital media has become prolific. However, even though user media collections of many users include hundreds if not thousands of media items, no one user owns every media item. As such, users often desire to share their media collections. For example, the Apple® iTunes® media player allows users to share their media collections with up to five users on the same subnetwork. In the Apple® iTunes® media player, the sharing user must designate what portion of their media collection to share (e.g., the entire media collection, two or more songs, or a playlist). However, users with which the media collection is shared are limited by the fact that the shared media collection is disjoint from their own media collection. Another issue is that sharing is limited to users in the same subnetwork. Thus, there is a need for an improved system and method for sharing media collections.
A Local Area Network (LAN) based media collection aggregation system that addresses these issues is described in U.S. patent application Ser. No. 12/211,895, entitled SYSTEM AND METHOD FOR ENHANCED SMART PLAYLISTS WITH AGGREGATED MEDIA COLLECTIONS, which was filed on Sep. 17, 2008 and U.S. patent application Ser. No. 12/251,490, entitled SOURCE INDICATORS FOR ELEMENTS OF AN AGGREGATE MEDIA COLLECTION IN A MEDIA SHARING SYSTEM, which was filed on Oct. 15, 2008, both of which are hereby incorporated herein by reference in their entireties. However, one issue with the described LAN based media collection aggregation system is that participation is limited to those nodes that are within the LAN. As such, there is a need for a LAN based media collection aggregation system that enables remote participation.